There was a time during Trump’s first term when local theater did some spine-stiffening standing up to him. Among the notable nose-thumbing shows was Mosaic Theater’s Vicuña & The American Epilogue, a political allegory by Jon Robin Baitz about a scruplesless buffoon — a stand-in for Trump — who requires his tailor to dress him for success. Another memorable local takedown was Mike Daisey’s scathing monologue at Woolly Mammoth The Trump Card, which, during its run, Daisey revised to keep up with revelations of Trump’s abuse of women. So much local theater targeted Trump, either directly or indirectly, that my DC Theater Arts colleague David Siegel and I wondered aloud whether DC theater had become “addicted” to Trump. “Has DC theater become dependent for its relevance on Trumpism the way other media have become reliant on Trumpism for ratings and circulation?,” I asked back then. “And are we having what amounts to a collective addiction, the kind that we’d all have withdrawal symptoms from if and when Trump and all his toadies are no longer in power?”
My naiveté there aside, those were the good old days, it turns out — halcyon times when we had no premonition that things would ever get as bad as they have gotten in Trump’s second term. Yet nowadays, the topic of Trumpism is broached explicitly on local stages hardly at all. The collapse of NEA funding and Trump’s imperious takeover of the Kennedy Center have sent a chill. Arts leaders who program seasons are in a new bind (as Deryl Davis reported in DCTA, “How can theater talk back to Trump?”). And now Trump has deployed the military to police DC, a vainglorious diversion of attention from his plunging approval ratings and suppression of the Epstein files.
Against the backdrop of Trump’s burgeoning autocracy, an upstart new theater company named Fear and Misery in DC has staged Bertolt Brecht’s 90-year-old anti-Nazi play, Fear and Misery in the Third Reich, with an exemplary activist sass that’s pitch-perfect for these times of terror and timidity.
Brecht wrote Fear and Misery in the Third Reich between 1933 and 1938 (before the Holocaust became public knowledge). It’s a series of playlets, each depicting the prevailing atmosphere of fear among common folk under authoritarian oppression. The production now at Capitol Hill Arts Workshop, directed inventively by Theo Yu, selects a dozen of those playlets (as translated by Eric Bentley), and — this is the genius part — inserts in between them recent news from the homegrown dictatorship front.
The contemporary interpolations relate to the playlets that follow in inspired and chilling ways. For instance, a 2025 news item about Trump’s assault on science and his slashing of research funding is juxtaposed with a scene set in 1935 at the University of Goettingen, where two physicists are reading excitedly about Einstein. When a scowling Nazi goosesteps by, the researchers immediately stop enthusing and instead trash Einstein’s work as “Jewish.”
For another example, a 2025 report on inhumane conditions in an ICE miigrant detention facility is followed by a scene set in 1936 Berlin in which a man recently released from a concentration camp for political prisoners, where his hands were mutilated, pays a visit to some old friends. Suspicious and fearful, his former comrades give him the cold shoulder. Underscoring the scene’s meaning today is a reading of an emotional letter from an immigrant detainee.
Similarly: A news clip read aloud from just days ago reports that the owner of the MAGA‑themed Trump Burger chain in Texas now faces deportation because of the Trump administration’s immigration policies. Right after that comes a playlet with a shocking ending: a butcher, after his SA-member son is arrested, hangs himself in his shop window with a sign around his neck reading “I voted for Hitler.” A more apt metaphor for voters’ buyer’s remorse, I cannot imagine.
Even as the show’s content is dense and deep — layered with much rich past-and-present resonance that can be challenging to track — the staging itself is very simple. Four versatile, improvisatory actors — Avery Dell (she/her), Daniella Ignacio (she/her), John Jones (they/them), and Genasee Worman (she/they) — play all the parts. They perform in a space that feels like a rehearsal room, a blackbox set with black chairs and a wardrobe rack. Minimal costume pieces indicate character, such as a robe and a strand of pearls to say “woman” or a Washington Nationals baseball cap and bandana to say “man.” (“In a cast with no men,” writes Theo Yu in their Director’s Note, “our production specifically explores how we perpetuate fascism through the performance of gender.”) Often the stage is dramatically washed in single solid colors; the acting style also is broad and obvious, like sketch comedy except dead serious.
For me, the show’s most poignant playlet was one set in Frankfurt in 1935 titled “The Jewish Wife.” This production introduced it with a 2025 news report of a South Los Angeles woman deported to Mexico. John Jones plays the wife who — faced with systematic persecution and marginalization of Jewish citizens under Nazi rule — has made the agonizing choice that she must leave her non-Jewish husband and leave Germany in order to save his career. We see her packing and phoning friends, desperately trying to find someone to look after her husband after she’s gone. And we see a parting conversation between her and her husband in which they speak of it as a short holiday both knowing it will be longer. A moving monologue by the wife, performed in English, is simultaneously performed in Spanish by Genasee Worman. It is a deeply touching juxtaposition referring to many people currently in peril.
I won’t give away the show’s powerful ending, except to say it’s an stunning call to resistance and a jolt to the system. If you’ve been looking for theater that doesn’t hesitate to call Trump a tyrant and a threat to democracy, this one’s for you.
Running Time: One hour and 40 minutes with no intermission.
Fear and Misery in the Third Reich plays through August 16, 2025, presented by Fear and Misery in DC performing at Capitol Hill Arts Workshop, 545 7th Street Southeast, Washington, DC. Tickets are Pay-What-You-Will (suggested donation: $20) and are available online.
Every performance will include a community discussion around tangible ways to organize, resist, and protect our rights. Ticket proceeds will be split evenly between Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid (MSMA) and Capitol Hill Arts Workshop (CHAW).
The program for Fear and Misery in the Third Reich is online here.
PERFORMANCES
Thursday, August 14 @ 7:00pm
Friday, August 15 @ 7:00pm*
Saturday, August 16 @ 2:00pm*
Saturday, August 16 @ 7:00pm
*Performances on Friday, August 15 at 7 pm and Saturday, August 16 at 2 pm are FACE MASKS REQUIRED. Face masks will be provided courtesy of Mask Bloc DC.
Fear and Misery in the Third Reich
By Bertolt Brecht
English Version by Eric Bentley
FEATURING
Avery Dell, Daniella Ignacio, John Jones, Genasee Worman
CREATIVE TEAM
Director/Producer: Theo Yu
Producer/Stage Manager Cover: Christina McCann
Stage Manager: Sven Klingen
Assistant Director: Bri Houtman
Sound Designer: Yasha Shulkin
Dramaturg: Siena Maxwell
Visual Identity Designer: Julia Winkler
